He was very sure. Even if he could be persuaded to abandon his woman and bastard children, Nduman fought with favor to his left arm ever since the judgment at Riqar and Salkith was an idiot. A well-trained idiot, but still an idiot and no match for a true Sheulek. He’d best them easily, both together if necessary, and then he’d put Nicci away in his mother’s old rooms and give her a servant or something so he wouldn’t ever have to deal with her. He could spend the rest of his life waiting to defend Xeqor and all the households of Uyane’s protection, a portrait of domesticity to do his father’s memory great honor.

‘And what will you do with Amber?’

This was disturbing for one or two short moments, and the most disturbing thing about it was the apparent ease with which his imagination was able to provide him with suggestions for how the two of them might sexually combine. Too many of his thoughts were turning in that direction lately. He accepted that for the distraction that it was, embraced it, owned it, and finally fought it down to a place where it could be ignored. Sex was not the issue. Amber was, in herself, not the issue. What was to come of the humans once he was away from them was not the issue, although it was bordering. The issue was and remained whether it was permissible or wise to set a human female at watch while he slept.

But he found he trusted Amber.

‘You don’t trust her, you just want to fuck her,’ he told himself cruelly, but the thought, although unsettling, did not sound like truth. Amber was weak and she was ignorant. She would not know every danger if she saw it. But if she did know it, by Sheul, she would defend him.

Meoraq opened his eyes on Amber, watching him with predictable exasperation and impatience. It really was the most amazingly ugly face, if one stopped to think about it. Strange, how often he simply didn’t see it.

‘She would never be boring,’ he thought, and snorted.

“That better not mean what I think it means,” she said, scowling at him with mud on her face and grass in her hair. Pinned to Gann four times, and not defeated yet.

His hand went out without his will to brush at her flat, smooth, pallid and generally disgusting brow—the second time he had done so. They both recoiled a little.

He recovered first, frowning. “So be it,” he said briskly. “We will hold watches between us at night and I will take you to hunt with me whenever possible.”

“Tomorrow?”

He hesitated, then shrugged his spines. “I could spare an hour in the morning if you rise early, although the only thing we’re likely to spear is more gruu.”

“At least it won’t run far,” she said with a crooked smile. “Maybe I can actually catch a limping potato.”

He grunted, then pointed sternly at her face. “But when I am not with you, you will stay within my camp. You go nowhere alone, do you mark me?”

“Okay, okay,” said Amber, rolling her eyes. “In the spirit of compromise, I promise to buddy up when I go to the bathroom.”

“Uyane hears your vow. You have the first watch tonight. Wake me when you begin to tire.”

“Got it.” She pushed herself onto her feet, but stayed bent awhile, brushing at dried mud and grass. This gave Meoraq the unlooked-for and not entirely unwelcome opportunity to watch her odd body in motion, so that when she finally straightened up and asked if he was going to sleep right away, the only honest answer was, “No. I think I have to pray.”

“Oh. Well…good night.” She backed up, then walked away across the camp, raising her hand as she went without bothering to look at him.

Meoraq watched her go until she took up her spear and a sentry’s position at the boundary of the camp, then resumed the assembly of his tent, trying to ignore the undeniable fact that he was profoundly, even painfully aroused. “Father,” he murmured, stabbing poles into the ground with more force than was usual. “See Your son in his ordeal and grant him the strength to endure it, because without Your hand upon me, O great Sheul, I do not know how I am going to survive this.”

Footsteps.

Meoraq glanced around, but it was Scott coming toward him, not Amber. He grunted dismissively and flattened the spines which had been flaring forward in greeting. “What do you want?”

“What were you two talking about?” the human asked, making a very poor effort to sound merely curious.

“If you wished to know, you should have come closer and joined us.”

A lengthy pause led Meoraq to silently congratulate himself on a scathingly civil retort, right up until Scott’s hesitant, “What?”

Meoraq sighed. He gave the tent-fasten under his hand a particularly vicious yank as he tied it to the pole and turned around. “I told her,” he said, speaking slowly, “to stand a watch.”

Scott stared at him and, after Meoraq had ample time to prepare a defense of this admittedly outrageous order, said, “What?”

“Go away!” snapped Meoraq and stomped past him to fetch up his pack and bedroll. “Why do you throw questions around when you cannot catch the answers? Swaggering idiot,” he muttered, ducking into his tent. “Sheul, my Father, grant me Your divine patience, and if You cannot grant me that, grant me the strength to knock his head off with one blow so that I don’t have to listen to him squeal.”

“What did he say?” called Scott, retreating.

Meoraq tied his tent shut and spread out his mat. He had the liberty to undress now, if he wished; if he opened his loin-plate the smallest degree, he would be out of it. He took his boots off, but left his clothes on and lay down. Eventually, Scott went away. The night was quiet. The wind was low. Amber was close and impossibly fierce with her pointed stick in her little hand. Meoraq prayed drowsily, indulged a few lustful thoughts of Gann’s devising, prayed some more, and slept.

* * *

He woke in his father’s room and did not, for some reason, think this was at all strange. He could smell breakfast in the making—bread baking, nai brewing, and something being fried in salty fat—which made the notion of going back to sleep considerably less attractive than it ordinarily might. His father’s cupboard-bed abutted the interior window, so he could see even without flicking the curtain aside that it was still early, not yet dawn.

He rolled over, rubbing the sleep out of his scales, and nudged the door open with his foot. The daughter of House Saluuk was there, her slender body broken into strange new alignment, but this was not strange to him either. She was pouring him a bath and she did it well, despite holding her silent, bloodied baby in one arm. Meoraq dismissed her with a wave and she went without speaking.

After washing, Meoraq opened his bedroom door and brought the first servant he saw to him. It was Shuiv, Sheulteb to House Arug in Tothax, dressed now in livery rather than a warrior’s harness, immaculate save for the small stain over his heart where his mortal wound yet bled. Meoraq gave the order for his morning meal to be brought and closed the door again, taking his father’s private stair to the roof.

His father was there already, seated on the ground with his back propped on a bench and a book balanced on one bent knee, reading. They raised hands to one another in the distracted, comfortable way they always had, but Meoraq kept walking. There were lamps lit behind the latticed wall that separated his father’s personal garden from that of his mother, and the sound of humming on the other side. Meoraq opened the connecting door without any sense of impropriety and went on in.

His mother was painting. He’d never seen her do that. She gave him an embarrassed sort of smile when he came to get a better look, turning the board so he could see the garden she had painted—a garden at night, mere suggestions of growth and blossom rendered in midnight shades of blue and black and silver, with three columns of brilliant orange fire rising at varying distance behind it. “I call it Blooms,” she said shyly.